Insert Column Name Here - A Birthday Present Of A Deck

As you may have read last week, July 3rd was my birthday. I was now thirty-eight, and had a day off to do whatever I wanted.

I am lousy at days off.

One of the down sides to working at home is that you never actually leave your work. Those of you who work at Blockbuster can’t do a damn thing to rent DVDs when you’ve shuffled back to your apartment. But me? Since my office is a laptop in front of my home theater system, and my work as a webmaster is endless, I always have work to do.

Am I caught up at StarCityGames? Well, there’s always something to be done there, but let’s assume that I’ve finished as much as I feel like doing for the day. Then I have my webcomic Home on the Strange to balloon, or scripts to write. And if it’s not that, well, I should write my column for MagictheGathering.com, or scrawl another chapter for my novel, or….

…yeah. I can’t relax. Even surfing for naughty movies on my laptop means that my bookmarks have “YOU SHOULD DO THIS” on the menu bar of my screen, nagging me.

To compensate for this, I need something to actively distract me. A game fulfills this purpose nicely; it’s like work in that it takes up my time, but it takes my mind away from my many functions.

On my big Birthday Day Off, I wrote an article for Magicthegathering.com, wrote a chapter for yet another novel-in-progress, checked in on some things for Pete, and then needed to relax with a game of Magic.

Oh, the game of Magic? It couldn’t be casual, because I’d be writing about it for, well, you guys now. So that’s work, too.

Man, I know how to kick back, don’t I?

Anyway, so I joined another Time Spiral League on my birthday. Here are the cards I got…. And they were a nice present from the universe, straight to my door.

Sealed Deck Pool

Ferrett Steinmetz

Test deck on 07-08-2007

Time Spiral Limited

Creatures (42)

Lands (1)

1 Calciform Pools

Spells (32)

White
Solid Playables: Blade of the Sixth Pride, Celestial Crusader, Icatian Crier, Momentary Blink, Pallid Mycoderm

Welcome once again to the game show called “A LOT OF CARDS, A LITTLE QUALITY!” In terms of numbers, we’re stuffed to the gills with White… But in terms of actual card strength, we’re left sorting through marginals.

Chronomantic Escape is something I’ve tried before and haven’t been impressed by. Sure, it stops an attack every third turn, but that usually means you have to be in a position to race effectively – and even then, all that means is that your opponent’s critters stay back on defense when you want them tapped out so you can smash face and win with a trick. This is a good card when you’re winning, but there are a lot of situations where it just doesn’t pan out.

Likewise, I like Ivory Giant, but unless I’m heavy White, it’s more of a drawback than anything else. Gift of Granite can be a good 23rd card if you have a 1/1 you need to protect, but aside from that it’s not something I’m enthusiastic about (even if Craig Stevenson was wondering actively whether it was any good).

What we have without that, then, are a couple of efficient dorks and token-generators, one card that turns our x/1 dorks into x+1/2 dorks, and a good blocker and Saproling-producer. I am not horrifically impressed by this, so we’ll be moving on.

Blue
Solid Playables: Brine Elemental, Cancel, Coral Trickster, Delay, Dream Stalker, Errant Ephemeron, Foresee, Willbender

This, on the other hand, is a big Birthday prezzie wrapped up in a pack. This reads almost like a wish list of the things I’d like to see in Blue; the best Suspend spell, a tricky Timeshifted morph that no one will expect, a card that punishes an opponent for tapping out, and one of the best card-drawing spells in Limited in the block.

I was a little leery of Delay, since it’s not a hard counter, but generally buying yourself three turns to deal with whatever threat your opponent has presented is enough. It doesn’t remove it permanently, but more than once I’ve either re-delayed a devastating Phthisis or bought myself time to draw the removal spell I needed. For 1U, that’s about as good as you can hope for.

Even the marginal Blue spells are good; Reality Acid, Ophidian Eye, Riptide Pilferer, and Veiling Oddity are all perfectly playable in the right kind of deck. This is nothin’ but force.

Black
Solid Playables: Corpulent Corpse, Deathspore Thallid, Mass of Ghouls, Mindstab, Pit Keeper, Viscid Lemures

Well, they’re playable, but not exciting. Deathspore Thallid’s stock has risen considerably in the advent of Sprout Swarm, but we don’t have a Sprout Swarm. Aside from that, we have two strong spells competing for the first-turn Black drop, and a couple of mostly-vanilla critters with some tacked-on abilities.

And you know what we don’t have? Removal. Ah, that’s the nail in the coffin for this color.

Red
Solid Playables: Empty the Warrens, Fatal Attraction, Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician, Rift Elemental, Skirk Shaman, Sudden Shock, Sulfurous Blast, Word of Seizing

Hmm. Two cards pop out at me – Word of Seizing and Sulfurous Blast, both bombs in this format – and then there are the two burn spells, always nice. After that, there are a lot of cards that need some help to work. Rift Elemental is surprisingly good, yanking your suspended cards back while creating a nasty choice in combat… But it really only works in the late game when you have mana to spare.

Ib Halfheart is better than you’d think, but usually poorly used. I’ve won twice in recent memory to people who decided they’d go for broke sacrificing Mountains in response to a Shock effect. Then I Subterranean Shamblered and they were left with no defense and no land. Whoops.

This is good Red; we’ll be using some of it, no doubt. But there aren’t enough solid creatures for me to feel comfortable running it as a main color, though I definitely could in a pinch. So what’s Green have to offer?

Green
Solid Playables: Citanul Woodreaders, Deadwood Treefolk, Durkwood Baloth, Greenseeker, Imperiosaur, Molder, Search for Tomorrow, Sporoloth Ancient, Utopia Vow, Wormwood Dryad

Wow. Just as Blue had everything I looked for in Blue, this has everything I want in Green; mana-fixing and land-thinning out the wazoo, four solid fatties to beat face with, and recycling. Heck, it even has some semi-removal in the form of Utopia Vow, and card drawing!

The only thing it really lacks is combat tricks. But… What’s that, Blue? You have some combat tricks to spare, and counterspells to prevent any ugly surprises? Well, okay, then, Blue, I think you and Green are a lock!

(Incidentally, I like Craw Giant in theory, but not at four Green mana. Too likely to clog the hand, baby, too likely to clog the hand.)

Artifacts, Land, and the Rest:
Solid Playables: Candles of Leng, Ghostfire

Okay. So we have three Red burn spells. Nice. And Candles of Leng is one of the more potent artifacts in the format; it won’t help you in the early game, but it ensures you come out ahead in almost any ground stall.

So what do we have? A very solid birthday deck.

7 Forest
7 Island
3 Mountain
1 Willbender
1 Brine Elemental
1 Cancel
1 Candles of Leng
1 Citanul Woodreaders
1 Coral Trickster
1 Deadwood Treefolk
1 Delay
1 Dream Stalker
1 Durkwood Baloth
1 Errant Ephemeron
1 Fatal Attraction
1 Foresee
1 Ghostfire
1 Greenseeker
1 Imperiosaur
1 Primal Plasma
1 Search for Tomorrow
1 Sporoloth Ancient
1 Sudden Shock
1 Utopia Vow
1 Veiling Oddity
1 Wormwood Dryad

The only question of this deck, as far as I’m concerned, is whether I need to get greedy. Obviously Word of Seizing and Sulfurous Blast are crazy-good, but I don’t think I have the mana to squeeze them in consistently…. And the deck is pretty strong without them. Considering that I’ve been on a long streak of losing to my own mana lately, I didn’t want to chance getting stuck with cards in my hand.

That said, if I noted that an opponent was particularly vulnerable to either card (or both), I threw in an extra Mountain, took out a Forest or an Island, and ran it. Usually, this meant I couldn’t cast ‘em until the late game, which I did, which worked just as well because by then they thought they knew my deck.

So How’d It Do?
The deck went 9-2 in the matches I played, generally playing very strong. It had the early defense to get to the late game… And thanks to Candles and my own counterspells, I could usually own the late game. (That said, I didn’t run into one instance of Sprout Swarm, my nemesis, in an astonishing eleven games; I always lose to Sprout Swarm.)

The Delays were golden in this deck, since an extra three turns either meant that I won or I drew enough cards to establish a board position. And the fatties meant that usually my opponent had used up his removal on a Sporoloth Ancient or an Imperiosaur early on, at which point I’d retrieve it with Deadwood Treefolk. I wrecked B/R decks with this, since I could counter their big threats and recycle my own (though the games usually went long to twenty turns).

I was quite happy… and the deck was fun to play! So it was a win/win on my birthday. Woo hoo!

The Weekly Plug Bug
This week on Home on the Strange involves something the vast majority of Magic players have never had to do: taking out life insurance. That’s right, Karla and Tom are planning for the future… And to safeguard Karla’s very existence, Tom must give up the very essence of life itself.

Signing off,
The Ferrett
TheFerrett@StarCityGames.com
The Here Edits This Site Here Guy